some heavy shit has been happening, still figuring out how I want to write about it. it seems that family troubles are the most inescapable.

need to get to sleep, work in the morning, a few quick placeholders for myself, to remind me of things I wanted to write about:

G. Stein; the dark red line; Rilke at the gate; Clark Street and late-night driving;there are two black vests hanging on the hall-pegs of my heart.

He kissed the birthmark near my pelvic bone.

“Who else has seen this?” He looked me in the eyes.

“No one,” I said quietly, shaking my head. I thought about my mother and the baths of my infancy, but I knew this wasn’t what he meant.

He became very serious, like a child. The dawn light reached his face through the curtains– how many times did I see him this way? Each, each a different devastation.

“I have only ever been with one other,” he said. Struggling to keep his native words above the flood, they were turning foreign in his tanned mouth. The way he said other made no allowances– we were the only, the human, the living. No one else could have made themselves understood. I was fifteen, it was true.

His belt buckle hit the carpet. 

The song stuck in my head understood disappointment. It warned me, it warned me not to burst into flames when he parked at the stop sign near my childhood home and walked me the rest of the way. 

For a moment, I knew that some day I would be in a hammock, sobbing, and that when I tried to throw away the shirt I wore that night it would take me years. I let myself forget. Forget, forget, forget.

I am not waking up on a floor in New Orleans. I am not sliding my bike across the gravel of his driveway. I am not sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. I am not breaking everybody’s brothers’ hearts.

I will spend $15 on dud drugs and drive 900 miles away and perhaps one day I will see you again, and perhaps you will be happy, elsewhere, or perhaps one day someone will call me on the telephone, and I will know that what you said to me in that red room was true.

There must be something in the water, something in the stars, some curse come crashing down around me– each way I look another pair of arms I would embrace is struggling under the weight of some misfortune. It’s enough to make think I should avoid you, all the ones I love, to keep you from being sighted by this storm, ripped up by roots and tossed across the sky.

Eras ago, someone asked me, is there anyone you’d kill for, anyone you’d draw blood to protect? Of course, I said, my brother.

And now, knife drawn, I have no enemy to turn to. 

   I’m sitting on the bus going south and I’m looking at the women outside. There are so many of them, women. We are about to pass my old apartment. I am tired. Teenaged Mexican girls are holding their younger brothers’ hands, crossing in the middle of the street. Their eyes look familiar. There are scarecrow white women, a layer of powder tucked into expensive boots. There are girls who hide their eyes behind their hair.
   I remember, years ago, a cigarette in the middle of the night.

   I stared at her photograph before I walked out the door. I couldn’t see her face, just that body and the tiled wall. I couldn’t imagine the face I saw on the school bus each morning, I couldn’t imagine that face and that body in the same room. Her face looked tired, pretty yet petty and uninvested. But her body, those breasts, hyper-saturated, shower-wet, her body was full of electricity I wanted.
   I thought to myself: we will meet mid-way between our houses. We will be the only figures in the street. We will light our cigarettes, and when for the first time she takes it from her lips I will kiss her, I will pull the smoke from her mouth.
   We stood there in silence. In the streetlight I could see the makeup on her face and I thought, how can I kiss her if she won’t show me her skin? Her arms looked thin, I wondered if she was cold. I wanted her, but I didn’t want to try. I felt underdressed, I felt awkward, my cigarette was almost done and what could I do but say good night. We may have hugged, all bony shoulders, joints clacking against each other, flesh tucked back, I don’t remember. I best recall her small fingers, casting in the night air, and the wish to keep them warm.

Now, as always, I am thinking about you.

I spent a considerable amount of time today going through some of the small images– photographs, magazine clippings, pages of books, drawings– that I’d shoved into various notebooks and folders. Decorating my apartment, I wondered about the overall visual effect of Gertrude Stein’s flat in Paris. (And Picasso, he, like I now, once lived in an apartment overlooking a cemetery.) Still more to go through, I always manage to have piles of papers.

Saw someone I rarely get to see tonight, he is moving back to Chicago soon and hearing his enthusiasm about returning further fueled my own enthusiasm despite the daunting approach to winter. Other thoughts about this to be articulated soon.

It was decided today that this year will be my first Christmas spent in Chicago. My parents and my brother will come out here from New York. I will get a Christmas tree. I’m quite excited. I am, however, taking a trip in December, earlier, to Los Angeles. I’m super excited about that too. 

okay so this has been making the rounds.

it makes me a little uncomfy, because calling very public (read: internet) attention to the delicate identities of young children makes me worry, because how will he feel about this when he is 14 and trying to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever or just doesn’t want to be someone who was low-key famous on the internet. especially with the post title that makes such a strong identifying statement, even if it is qualified at the start of the post. and it is naive to not expect a boy in a girl’s outfit to be made fun of, especially in a church preschool. it sucks, but it is generally how things go.

all that said: I truly and intensely admire this woman’s unwavering support and love for her son. It’s beautiful, and ballsy, and what the world needs more of. I very nearly cried reading it.

–

At a family reunion over a year ago, I saw a bunch of little cousins from the Southern branch of my family, some of whom I hadn’t seen since their infancy. I can never keep track of them, it seems a blur of multiple marriages and tan children named after rural places. But one of them– I can’t even recall his name or which of these many women is his mother–is very clearly trans. Textbook. Super feminine, doesn’t like his name, and according to the Branca gossip mill has come to his mother crying, telling her he hates his penis and wishes he was a girl. I worry. I worry. I don’t know. I want to be there for this stranger, this child, I want him or her or whatever to know there are people who will understand, or if not understand then love him anyway. But I have seen this kid twice in the last several years, I’m not in contact, I am the strange Midwestern outcast of this sprawling family that I love so dearly. So instead, I jet thoughts south from my cold apartment, hoping somehow everything will be alright.

Even when it is the fault of my own over-crowded schedule, my self-imposed flustering from location to location, stopping for harried meals and half-distracted conversations, grabbing shelter in an archway from the downpour, it pains me when the gears of our conversation slip off track. Every excited thought of mine, some part of it is for you. Or rather, my ability to become invested in some idea, some item, some moment, is now entangled with the desire to share with you that which matters to me. Part of my enjoyment is in the refraction of that pleasure in those I hold dear. Not to have you here at hand is to walk with a limp along autumn gardens.

Of course there are others, friends, collaborators, lovers, and my attachment to you does not sever those ties, but you are the precise you to you me. Even as other strings thicken, draw taut, they are of a different color, a different texture. Strips of brown leather, lines of black silken thread, bright red yarn that will fray but not break. There are infinite ways, for everyone and for you. You and I, too, we shift, the transmography of time and place and character does not cease, nor would I have it so. But they do ache, my arms, from holding up a telephone wire across the Atlantic, and the heavy watch-chain on my shoulders.

this is admittedly a placeholder for a post I want to write about the film Cache, which I saw tonight. 

(key words to remind myself: sons, timing, faces, language)

It is often only later that I can fully appreciate the neurotic peculiarity–sometimes even desperation–of actions I have turned to so readily in the past. Fear, inertia, the drive for comfort, these are powerful masters.  

Filling a mug with water in my kitchen, sock feet on swollen checkered tile, a memory:

living in Paris, I often would make my tea by reaching into the tiny alcove that was my bathroom, all shower, and turn the faucet as hot as it would go. Steam rising everywhere, I would fill my mug. Good enough for the cheapest black tea sold at monoprix. But there was a kitchen just down the hall, usually unoccupied during the odd hours I kept. I even owned a pot I could have used to heat the water instead of the microwave. But something about that just seemed like far too much. The possibility of seeing others, especially other American strangers, was overwhelming in its horror. In those panics, late night, early morning, mid-evening, alone, I did not want to see anyone. There were of course many nights I went out, bought drinks to both hide and forget my poverty, spoke awful French with charming, well-dressed foreigners, did a great number of other things, but in Paris I slept alone. I spent much of my time alone, locked in that room drinking tea and trying to write. I do not, in fact, have much writing from that period. But I did spend a lot of time trying, and a lot of time alone, and that was how I did and did not want it.